Brian Naylor

In this role, he covers politics and federal agencies, including transportation and homeland security.

With more than 30 years of experience at NPR, Naylor has served as National Desk correspondent, White House correspondent, congressional correspondent, foreign correspondent and newscaster during All Things Considered. He has filled in as host on many NPR programs, including Morning Edition, Weekend Edition and Talk of the Nation.

During his NPR career, Naylor has covered many of the major world events, including political conventions, the Olympics, the White House, Congress and the mid-Atlantic region. Naylor reported from Tokyo in the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, from New Orleans following the BP oil spill, and from West Virginia after the deadly explosion at the Upper Big Branch coal mine.

While covering the U.S. Congress in the mid-1990s, Naylor's reporting contributed to NPR's 1996 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Journalism award for political reporting.

Before coming to NPR in 1982, Naylor worked at NPR Member Station WOSU in Columbus, Ohio, and at a commercial radio station in Maine.

Retired Gen. James Mattis' nomination to be President-elect Donald Trump's secretary of defense may, well, march through the Senate, but there is one potential obstacle to maneuver around: the retired general part.

The National Security Act of 1947, which established the current national defense structure, had a key stipulation, requiring that the secretary of defense be a civilian well removed from military service. In fact, the law is quite clear:

President-elect Donald Trump delivered a campaign-style speech at what was billed as the first stop in a thank-you tour in Cincinnati, Ohio, tonight, in which he pledged to unite America while at the same time recounting old grievances against the news media, and his political opponents.

Trump also used the occasion to announce he will nominate retired Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis as secretary of defense, calling him "the closest thing we have to Gen. George Patton of our time."

President-elect Donald Trump says he has a simple goal in mind when it comes to federal regulations. In a video he released Monday, Trump said he "will formulate a rule that says that for every one new regulation, two old regulations must be eliminated. So important."

There are some 80,000 pages in the Federal Register, where all regulations are published. So it should be a simple task to pare back some of them. Wrong.

After a week filled with questions and rumors of turmoil behind the scenes of President-elect Donald Trump's transition team, his staff is now publicly laying out a more concrete timetable to get their work of ensuring a smooth handoff up to speed.

The Trump transition team will begin notifying the Obama administration of its designees to meet with current agency officials starting today.

Reince Priebus once joked about his job as chairman of the Republican National Committee that people assumed he must be miserable. But Priebus said he didn't see it that way. "I'm not pouring Bailey's in my cereal," he told CNN.

Now, as newly named chief of staff to President-elect Donald Trump, Priebus has his work cut out for him.

Priebus will have a large say in hiring West Wing staff, and will "be in charge of day to day operations," he told Fox News on Monday morning. He'll also have the president-elect's ear as a top adviser.

President-elect Trump is shaking up the leadership of his transition team, naming Vice President-elect Mike Pence as chairman. Pence will take over the role from New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who was named as a vice chairman of the team's executive committee.

Pence, Indiana's governor and a former congressman, brings some Washington expertise and has long-standing relationships with congressional leaders such as House Speaker Paul Ryan.

The election just ended and the new president doesn't even take office until Jan. 20. But the transition planning starts now.

Who's going to be President-elect Donald Trump's secretary of state? His chief of staff? His education secretary? Now that the news of Trump's election has settled, speculation over how the president-elect will fill out his administration has consumed Washington.

Keeping in mind the truism that nobody who knows is talking, and those who are talking don't really know, here are some of the names being floated, leaked and speculated about.

President Obama, saying "we are all rooting for his success," vowed his staff would work as hard as it can to ensure a successful transition of power to president-elect Donald Trump.

Obama spoke in the White House Rose Garden with Vice President Joe Biden at his side. The president had phoned Trump at 3:30 Wednesday morning to congratulate him on his upset victory over democrat Hillary Clinton, and invited Trump to the White House Thursday to discuss transition matters.

Concerns about the possible hacking of voting systems on Election Day are growing. 46 states have asked the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to help make sure their systems are protected from disruptions on Tuesday. And some states, like Ohio, are taking steps on their own.

Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, a Republican, says his state worked with "all available public and private cyber security experts" to test Ohio's voting systems, including a newly-created cybersecurity unit at the state's National Guard.

The federal government, filled with creaky computer systems that are a poor match for the cybersecurity threats that agencies face from an array of hackers, criminals and foreign governments, is hoping for a multibillion-dollar capital infusion to modernize its IT infrastructure.

"It's the consumers' information. How it is used should be the consumers' choice." So said FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler as the commission adopted rules requiring Internet service providers such as Comcast and Verizon to get customers' permission before selling the data they collect to marketers.

In a political season full of "did they really go there?" moments, there was another last night on the Fox News Channel. Host Megyn Kelly, a past target of Donald Trump's tweets, was interviewing former House speaker, now Trump surrogate, Newt Gingrich.

Gingrich expressed his ire over the amount of time the news media have devoted to coverage of the women who have accused Trump of making unwanted sexual advances, compared with coverage of Hillary Clinton's speech leaked to WikiLeaks in which she talks about open borders.

In case you needed more evidence of the toll this divisive campaign is taking on America, a new survey says more than a third of social media users are "worn out" by the amount of political content they encounter.

President Obama's days in office are dwindling, and it's clear he intends to have as much fun as he can on the way out. Last night during a West Coast fundraising trip, he stopped by ABC's Jimmy Kimmel Live.

Obama took part in a recurring bit called "Mean Tweets," which consists of reading aloud some of the, you guessed it, mean tweets about him of late.